Strength training at eighty-one

Rowena Blythe was eighty-one before anybody suggested she lift anything heavier than a kettle, which her physiotherapist calls a system failure rather than a clinical one.

Strength training in the eighties works. It is prescribed rarely, described cautiously, and generally offered later than it should be.

Discharge, and the fortnight after

Continuity matters more here than in almost any other population, because the history is long and the person telling it may not be the patient.

We are more frightened of prescribing strength work in the eighties than the eighties are of doing it.

Nadia Kovač, physiotherapy lead

Eleven medicines, seven of them intended

The list grows because every appointment can add and almost none are structured to remove. Nobody is at fault; the mechanism simply only runs one way.

She carries her own shopping. “I stopped doing that in 2019 because somebody implied I shouldn’t.”